Many types of transactions and access to services are authorized by the presentation of some form of identification/transaction/access card such as a credit card, debit card, voter registration card, or a health care access card. Many of these cards have incorporated thereon a stripe of magnetic material on which information has been written by the issuer of the card to aid in either access to services and/or identification of the card holder. Such cards are referred to, hereinafter, as transaction cards.
Fraudulent use of transaction cards occurs when an individual presents an unauthorized card issued to another at a transaction point in order to gain access to services or resources. This problem is addressed by the present invention.
Fraud in the credit industry can be used to illustrate the problem. One method of reducing fraud focuses on the confirmation of the identity of the person presenting a card at the transaction point as the individual to whom the card was authorized by the issuer. Images of card holders are useful in this identification process. Images of card holders are now printed on some of the poly-vinyl chloride (PVC) card stock of transaction cards such as the PhotoCard from the Citibank Corporation. This method takes a reflection print included with the credit application, captures the print with an electronic camera to convert it to a color digital format, and then "digitally imprints" the color image with a thermal dye-transfer process onto the PVC.
Transaction cards without images printed thereon are counterfeited today. The addition of the digitally imprinted image of a card holder makes counterfeiting more difficult as card fabrication requires the writing of a false image onto the card. However, imprinting an image alone is not sufficient to prevent card forgery.
The image imprinted on the card with dye is not directly available in digital form, although a similar digital file could be recovered by converting the analog dye densities back to a digital signal by rescanning. The two digital images are unlikely to match exactly, and the process involves color scanning hardware not normally found at the transaction point or other financial transaction locations. In order to use the image information for means other than to deter card fraud, the digital image information has to be stored on the card. Such a recording scheme is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,321,751 entitled, "Method and Apparatus for Credit Card Verification" by Lawrence A. Ray and Richard N. Ellson, and assigned to EASTMAN KODAK Co., the assignee of the present application.
Magnetic data densities on transaction cards are very low in comparison to modern magnetic media used for computer data storage as in the common 31/2 inch micro diskettes. The high-density track of a transaction card has been written with 210 bits per inch on a track less than 3 inches long. Transaction cards are formatted with a maximum of three data tracks, one of which has an even lower density of 75 bits per inch. Total storage capacity if all tracks were high density would be less than 2000 bits, or under 250 bytes. It is desired to only use a single track for digital image storage for several reasons, such as the need to store account information, and keeping the magnetic head assembly inexpensive. Data capacity of single track of the conventional transaction card in use today is less than 600 bits.
Digital images of even relatively modest image size require a significant number of bits to either store or encode uncompressed raw images. Consequently there has been a continuing effort to develop ever more sophisticated image compression methods to reduce the impact of storing digital images. For instance a very small, uncompressed, full color image could easily require nearly 240,000 bits.
Augmenting the data on,the card with additional data transmitted to the transaction point has proven impractical. Raising bandwidth of communications to enable transmission of the entire or part of the image would require substantial investment in the communications network in order to maintain quick transaction times and keep down queue times for transaction terminals. Also, since transaction point communications are largely done over existing telephone networks any improvement in bandwidth is largely outside the control of the credit card industry. Current transactions require 1000 bits, and network loading factors are such that even additions of 50% to the transaction size would severely increase customer queue times to the point of being unacceptable.
A need has therefore been felt for an apparatus and a method for storing recognizable image in a small storage area. Specifically, a need has been felt for an apparatus and a method to store a recognizable image on a transaction card which conforms to the ISO-7811/2 standards.